* Russ Allbery:
> There's actually some stuff in udev or some related package to deal with
> this, but I can't ever seem to find it when I need it. I think this is
> actually a documentation bug more than a functionality bug; we just need a
> better guide on how to do it. You can, somehow, assign persistant device
> name mappings by MAC address.
Actually, udev does this automatically. John's complaint is that this
process doesn't reuse existing slots freed by hardware changes.
> One of the problems is that whenever you look for something about how to
> fix this, you end up with ifrename, which in my experience doesn't work
> well with udev.
ifrename has been completely superseded by udev, just edit
/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules and assign the names you
want.
The trouble is that nowadays, the kernel does not assign predictable
interface names, and an increasing number of systems has got more than
one Ethernet interface. The downside is that typical Debian
installations aren't cloneable anymore.